Position Summary
We are seeking an innovative and highly motivated Staff Technical Product Manager who will contribute significantly to the development of our advanced cell therapy manufacturing platform.
The primary focus of this position will be to understand user needs and workflows for instruments used for cell therapy manufacturing. This individual will interact with customers, partners, and internal subject matter experts to understand and document their cell therapy manufacturing processes and develop actionable requirements for the engineering, analytical and process development teams. This person will work closely with the technical teams overseeing complex projects and should have a structured methodology for gathering, managing and communicating customer feedback.
This is a multidisciplinary role and this individual will interface across many parts of the company (with scientists, researchers, process development, and engineers) to develop the best solutions possible. The successful candidate will be a resident expert in representing the voice of the customer and translating them to tangible engineering requirements.
Candidates should enjoy working in a fast-paced, mission-driven environment, and be prepared to tackle a broad selection of challenges as the company grows.
Responsibilities
- Define and communicate product vision and strategy, outlining the product's direction and ensuring alignment with strategic objectives
- Synthesize a coherent product roadmap based on customer input, industry trends, business goals, and engineering competencies, ensuring that it drives the prioritization of the product backlog and software development
- Serve as the internal customer and partner advocate with cross-functional teams
- Work with our partners and customers, capture their critical needs, then gather and prioritize system requirements
- Work closely with cross-functional teams, including software developers, quality assurance professionals, UI/UX designers, and other stakeholders, to implement changes that improve product quality, usability, and user satisfaction
- Write clear and concise system requirements that detail what needs to be built and why
- Identify and prioritize key features and functions based on feedback from internal stakeholders and external customers
- Drive differentiated solutions to the market through customer focus, data-driven decision making, and clear, frequent, and open cross-functional communication
- Stay up-to-date on industry trends, competitors, and best practices, and share this knowledge with the team and leadership
Requirements
- Bachelor degree or higher in Engineering or Biological Sciences
- 12+ years of extensive, hands-on Product Management experience in the biotechnology or medical device industries, especially experience bringing a product to market
- Experience with large scale automation and benchtop instrumentation in pharma/biotech is highly desirable
- Domain expertise in cell therapies is highly desirable
- Familiarity with human cell biology, immunology, cell isolation, cell culture, characterization, and gene editing
- Knowledge of regulatory requirements and quality standards, such as FDA, ISO, and GMP, applicable to the cell therapy market
- Excellent verbal, written, presentation and interpersonal skills
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
- Proactive, creative, self-motivated, flexible to work in a small company environment and assume a wide variety of tasks
- Desire to be part of a rapidly evolving organization, with a compelling technology, and taking products and processes to the next level
- Self-awareness, integrity, authenticity, and a growth mindset
This is Cellares
Cellares is the first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO) and takes an Industry 4.0 approach to mass manufacturing the living drugs of the 21st century. The company is both developing and operating integrated technologies for cell therapy manufacturing to accelerate access to life-saving cell therapies. The company’s Cell Shuttle integrates all the technologies required for the entire manufacturing process in a flexible and high-throughput platform that delivers true walk-away, end-to-end automation. Cell Shuttles will be deployed in Cellares’ Smart Factories around the world to meet total patient demand for cell therapies at global scale. Partnering with Cellares enables academics, biotechs, and pharma companies to accelerate drug development and scale out manufacturing, lower process failure rates, lower manufacturing costs, and meet global patient demand.
The company is headquartered in South San Francisco, California with its commercial-scale IDMO Smart Factory in Bridgewater, New Jersey. The company is backed by world-class investors and has raised over $355 million in financing.
Leveling will be based on overall experience, education, and demonstration of knowledge throughout the interview process.
What We Do
Cellares is revolutionizing cell therapy manufacturing. We are developing a one-of-a-kind solution, The Cell Shuttle, to overcome the challenges associated with manufacturing so these life-saving therapies are affordable and widely available to patients who can benefit.
The clinical impact of cell therapy in treating cancer has been proven, but this therapeutic approach has several limitations, especially in manufacturing, leaving extremely sick patients waiting for treatment and desperate for hope.
Since cell therapy is currently produced for a single patient at a time, it is expensive to manufacture, requiring significant time and resources, and is difficult to scale.
Preclinical and clinical scientists, as well as commercial cell therapy manufacturers also lack the options to fully automate their manufacturing process quickly, safely, cost-effectively and at the scale they need.
The Cell Shuttle is an automated and closed end-to-end manufacturing solution that is flexible and scalable, enabling customers to run exact processes specified for their cell therapy. Compared with the current manual manufacturing processes for cell therapy, the Cell Shuttle’s next-generation automated manufacturing solution has 10 times the scalability (meaning 10 times more patient doses can be produced simultaneously), enables a three-fold reduction in process failure rates and will reduce the per-patient manufacturing cost by up to 70 percent for most processes.
